Robert Redford Is Not Thinking About the Oscars, O.K.?

As the founder of the Sundance Film Festival, Robert Redford has helped nurture more budding young directors than anybody. So why did he choose this moment to appear for the first time in one of their films?

“No one else had ever asked,” Redford said before last night’s New York Film Festival screening of J. C. Chandor’s All Is Lost.

*Star Trek’*s Zachary Quinto, an executive producer on the film, explained how he and Chandor—who previously collaborated on the 2011 financial-crisis thriller Margin Call—got the idea to cold-call the Sundance Kid.

“We read an interview in which he said he was interested in acting in a film without directing it,” Quinto said. “So there’s a sense that we picked up on that he was in a good place to be approached.”

Chandor described what happened next. “I sent a 31-page script to him, and probably four days later I got a phone call that he wanted to meet,” the director recalled. “Three days after that, I got a phone call from L.A. and I’m sitting in a room with him. Ten minutes in, he looks at me and he’s like, ‘Let’s do this.’”

Redford is alone on screen for the entirety of the 107-minute film. He plays a supremely competent—and remarkably reticent—sailor whose solo voyage on the Indian Ocean is disrupted by one stroke of rotten luck after another. It’s The Old Man and the Sea updated for the Robb Report crowd.

Asked how the yacht compared with some of his past co-stars, like Faye Dunaway (Three Days of the Condor) or Meryl Streep (Out of Africa), Redford smiled and said, “The yacht didn’t give me any trouble.” He added, “I love other actors, but working alone was great.”

Part of the film’s power derives from the fact that it’s very obviously Redford up there on the screen, at age 77, climbing the mast, getting tossed overboard, splashing around, and so on.

Did Chandor ever worry that he’d go down in history as the genius who got Robert Redford killed on a movie set?

Redford, who returned to acting in 2013 after a five-year hiatus with All Is Lost and The Company You Keep (which he directed), is also a celebrated conservationist. Asked if the government shutdown had the potential to hurt the National Parks, he narrowed his eyes and said, “It already is hurting the National Parks.”

In 1981, Redford won the Academy Award for best director for Ordinary People, and he received an honorary Oscar in 2002. But many awards watchers think this is the year he will finally win best actor.

Now that he’s proven with this film that he can survive anything, is he ready for the unholy grind of awards season?

“I’m not thinking about that right now!” he said as the current pulled him down what promises—or threatens—to be one of many, many red carpets in the months ahead.

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